


How He Feels

by paperjamBipper



Category: Moana (2016)
Genre: Gen, Literal Hurt/Comfort, and now for something angstier, but since it's after the fact the violence warning doesn't apply, goes into some detail about blood and injuries, maui doesn't know how injuries work, moana was probably taught how to treat severe injuries in her chief training
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-14 02:47:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9155692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperjamBipper/pseuds/paperjamBipper
Summary: "After he raised the sky, he went around making sure everyone’s backs were okay after they were bent over for too long. After he killed the giant eel, he ran around asking everyone he could find if they felt safe or if they were okay. But nobody had ever asked in return how he felt."Maui insists he's fine. He insists that his injuries don't matter and that they'll go away on their own. Moana knows better.A hurt/comfort fic that takes place immediately following Maui and Moana's encounter with Tamatoa.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This fic first came to me around the time the HD video for Shiny was released on YouTube. I had seen the movie twice, and I had seen poor quality versions of it online, yes, but I was never really aware of how BRUTAL Tamatoa actually was to Maui until I watched it. There's a lot of little details that's easy to miss. Did you know that when Tamatoa flings Maui off of his shell before he tries to eat him, Maui slams down on his neck, and not just his back? No? Me neither.
> 
> This spiraled a little bit after a friend and I were talking and one of us commented that we thought it was weird how Maui was using his hook as a literal crutch one minute and then acted like he was totally fine the next. Don't lie to Moana. We both know you're not 100% fine.

Moana is _exhausted._

After Maui finally managed to get his fish hook to cooperate with him and return him to his human form, Moana had asked if he had wanted to take a break. He had just taken the worst beating Moana’s ever seen, and she knew that even if he was a demigod, he wasn’t being completely honest when he said he was fine. She had originally planned to head straight to Te Fiti from Lalotai, but if Te Kā was as ruthless as Maui had described her, Moana knew there was no way she could drag him off to fight her immediately after what happened with Tamatoa.

Not only was she asking for his benefit, she was also partially asking for her own. Tamatoa had been swinging and tossing her around pretty violently, and every muscle in her body still ached. She wanted to stay on the beach where Lalotai’s entrance laid for the night so the two of them could get some rest, because she figured that they would both feel better in the morning and they could progress to Te Fiti faster.

But when she suggested the idea to Maui, he misunderstood her reasoning behind the suggestion, he snapped at her claiming he was fine, and that they didn’t have any time to lose anyway. Not wanting to bother trying to reason with him when he was already clearly not in the mood to argue, he and Moana boarded her boat and sailed away from Lalotai in silence. Despite her exhaustion, Moana offered to take over wayfinding for the rest of the night so Maui could have the time to himself he looked like he needed. He had his back turned to her, and clearly wasn’t in the mood for talking, so Moana ignored him and focused on what she was doing.

…Which proved to be a lot harder than she expected. The rope was hard to keep steady in her shaking hands, and the stick she used to steer the boat’s directions felt twice as heavy and difficult to manipulate as she remembered it being. Part of her was hoping wayfinding would keep her awake, because she always felt so excited when she had the opportunity to be the one in charge instead of Maui, but now all it was doing was putting her to sleep faster.

After taking a quick check of the stars to check their position, Moana sits down and leans forward on the steering stick, careful not to accidentally push it in a random direction and set them off-course.

She stays like this for a while, and eventually the boat’s gentle rocking and the sound of the ocean splashing against its side begins to put her to sleep. She fights to keep her eyes open, but eventually her exhaustion gets the best of her and she falls asleep completely.

It doesn’t last long. A sudden sharp gasp from Maui startles her awake, and thinking it’s because of what she’s doing, she quickly jumps up to her feet

“I’m up!” Moana calls to him. “I know the whole ‘wayfinders never sleep’ thing, but I’m really exhausted, and I _did_ offer to stay where we were for the night, but…” She starts, but then her voice trails off when his gaze finally meets hers. Instead of looking frustrated or annoyed, his expression instead looks soft, tired, and defeated. He whips his head away from her and sighs quietly.

 “Maui?” She asks, taking a step towards him. He doesn’t respond

“Maui, are you okay?” She asks, and he doesn’t respond, but as she approaches him she notices him staring down at his foot. It’s bleeding. Moana takes a step back, and only as she does this does she notice a number of other cuts and scratches moving across his back.

“You’re hurt” She says, approaching him slowly and reaching her hand out to touch his shoulder reassuringly.

“I’m fine” He snaps, and she recoils from the words as he returns his attention to his injured foot. Moana frowns, and approaches him again.

“No you’re not. You’re bleeding”

“It’ll stop in a minute”

“But what about your back?” She asks, and Maui goes quiet for a moment before responding again

“What part of ‘I’m fine’ are you not understanding?”

Moana sighs, and gently places her hand on Maui’s shoulder. He tenses up and takes another sharp inhale of air, so Moana takes her hand away and drops it to her side, frowning.

 “The part where you’re completely lying through your teeth.” She says, and turns around to return to steering the boat.  “I’m turning us around. We passed a small island a while back and I’m going to dock there so I can look over those nasty injuries of yours”

“What?” Maui asks, spinning himself around to face her. “I told you, we don’t have the time. We have to keep going”

She ignores him, and he slowly pushes himself up to his feet to walk to her and stop her from changing the boat’s course. “Moana. We have to keep-” He starts, but when he takes a step forward, a sharp pain shoots through his foot, and it catches him so off guard he loses his balance. He quickly grabs the pole of the sail to prevent himself from falling over, and uses it for support to help him stand all the way back up.

“Fine” he says in a tone that sounds more winded than frustrated, and Moana frowns as she begins to work on turning the boat around. When her attention is no longer focused on him, Maui takes the opportunity to slide back down the pole into a sitting position slowly, his eyes scrunched shut in how unbelievably painful it is to do so.

Maui is almost saddened by the amount of times Moana glances up to check on him. It’s almost as if she’s afraid that he’ll disappear if she doesn’t check to make sure he’s still there. He looks away from her and tries to focus his attention on something else, but when his eyes fall on his fish hook, he frowns. If it had just worked when he needed it to, he would’ve never gotten injured, they wouldn’t be traveling in the wrong direction, and he wouldn’t have to keep looking at that sad, concerned face Moana keeps shooting him. He sighs.

Just yesterday, he would’ve laughed at the girl for getting so easily concerned and distracted by something unimportant that didn’t matter. But now _he_ was the one distracting her. _He_ was the unimportant thing that was preventing her from getting to Te Fiti. This entire time he had thought it would be because her beloved pet chicken finally fell overboard and drowned once and for all, but no. It had to be him. He HAD to screw up. He HAD to lose that fight. He COULDN’T have just taken the fish hook, grabbed the girl, and run. He HAD to prove he still had it in him, which, he clearly did not. His frown deepens, and he shoves the hook away from him. He pretends he didn’t notice Moana watching him do it.

He then slowly slides himself into a lying down position, and, hoping it’ll help clear the negative thoughts clouding his mind, he closes his eyes and attempts to fall asleep.

He wakes up hours later when the canoe slams into the sand of an island.

“Sorry!” Moana calls to him as he jumps up into a sitting position. “Didn’t mean to land that roughly. I guess the shore was closer than I thought” She jumps off the boat to quickly check to make sure it’s secure enough, and once she’s sure it is, she hops back on the boat. 

“I’m telling you, curly, all you’re doing is wasting time” He says as he stands, depending heavily on the sail pole as he does so. “Aren’t you in a hurry to restore the heart so you can save your own island? All you’re doing by helping me is throwing away the time we don’t have”

“Well, I can’t restore the heart if you’re dead.” She jokes, and she carefully scoops up his arm and places it over her own shoulder. She then slowly walks him to the edge of the boat and then down onto the sand below. “You still haven’t taught me everything I need to know about wayfinding. What good would that make me?” She smiles at him, but when all she sees in his face is an uncomfortable frown, her smile fades.

“Alright, alright. Joking aside, you’re right. I _am_ in a hurry to get to Te Fiti” she says, but before Maui can say anything to protest, she continues. “But I can’t drag you there when you look like this. You can barely stand on your own two feet. If you’re going to have to face Te Kā again, I don’t want to have to watch what happened in that cave happen all over again when we run into her. I’m worried about you”

Maui almost stops right in his tracks.

“What?”  He asks her, his voice full of shock.

“I’m worried” Moana repeats, and glances up when she finds the two of them in a large shadow. Above them is one of the tallest palm trees Moana’s ever seen in her entire life.

“Wait here” she says, but before Maui can ask for any more clarification, she leaves him where he is to run back to her boat. Once back on, she opens the storage unit and pushes aside various baskets of fruit as well as HeiHei aside until she finds a large roll of bandages she knew she had packed before she left. _Bingo._ She pulls it out, closes the storage unit, and jumps off the boat before making her way back over to where Maui is sitting, a baffled expression plastered to his face.

“You’re…worried.” He repeats the words when she sits down next to him and begins to unravel a bandage.

“About you, yes” She says as she bites down on the bandage to rip a piece off. She grabs at his leg gently, and pulls the injured foot close to her so she can wrap it. There’s dry blood all over the bottom of it, and there’s a small hole where Tamatoa had stabbed his claw into it at the heel. Moana frowns. “I couldn’t stand watching what Tamatoa was doing to you. It was…the roughest thing I’ve ever been forced to watch in my entire life”.  She begins to wrap the bandage around his injured foot.

“It didn’t exactly feel great, either” Maui says as he watches her.

“I can imagine.” Moana says, scrunching her face up in disgust. “I didn’t know what to think. I tried to help, I really did, but Tamatoa threw me in that cage before I could do anything useful. I almost feel like he took it up a few notches after that, too, just because he knew I didn’t have any other choice but to watch”. Once she finishes wrapping the bandage around the injury, Moana presses the bandage into the injury firmly to get it to stay.

“He probably did.” Maui says, rubbing the back of his neck in discomfort. “I don’t remember much of what happened, but if you think he was taking things up a notch just to show off, it’s pretty likely that he was”

 Moana feels sick to her stomach. “Try to stand and tell me if you think the bandage feels okay” She says, clearly trying to distract herself from the thought. Maui stands slowly with a tight grip on the tree behind him. The pain in his foot has decreased dramatically since the last time he tried to stand on it, and the bandage seems to help him be able to reapply weight.

“It feels fine to me” He says, and he offers her a weak shrug before slowly sliding back into the sitting position.

“Good” Moana says, and she stands up. “I saw a few nasty cuts on your back last night. Do you think I could look those over?” she says, and Maui shifts uneasily. The last thing he needs right now is Moana staring at that awful tattoo while she takes care of an injury he got from failing to protect her. That would be like admitting defeat _twice_. But at the same time, because he neglected to let her look them over the night before, the cuts now stung every time he moved.

“Sure” He says eventually, and watches as Moana walks in a circle to his back. He tenses up for a quick moment when Moana touches one of his cuts, and eases up a moment later when he realizes she’s only looking at it.

“This is worse than I thought” Moana says, shaking her head as she stands up. “I wasn’t even touching one of your cuts. I think it might be infected. I’ll be right back” She says, and runs off towards the boat.

Maui watches her go, still trying to comprehend what’s going on. He’s never had someone pay such close attention to him in his entire life, and especially not when it came to checking in on him to see how he was doing. He had done it to other people hundreds of times in the past. After he raised the sky, he went around making sure everyone’s backs were okay after they were bent over for too long. After he killed the giant eel, he ran around asking everyone he could find if they felt safe or if they were okay. But nobody had ever asked in return how he felt, and he would be lying if he said it wasn’t a little overwhelming.

“I’m back” Moana’s voice suddenly says next to him, breaking his thoughts. A loud thump behind him startles him, and he looks back to see Moana trying to break open a coconut.

“Coconut water” she says when she catches his glance. “I’m going to try to pour some on this cut to clean it out” One last hard slam against the tree cracks the coconut in half, and Moana flinches at the slight spray that hits her face. “I know it may not be the freshest source of water out there, but it’s much better than using ocean water.” She shakes her head. “I can only imagine what that salt would feel like on an infected cut” She says, and carefully places one of the halves of the coconut down in the sand before changing into a kneeling position to make herself taller.

“Are you ready?” She asks him, but before he can respond, she dumps the water over his left shoulder and onto the cuts on that side of his back. Maui holds his breath in preparation for the same painful stinging sensation he had when Moana had touched it earlier. And it does, for a quick moment, but then the stinging feeling goes away and is replaced with a cooler, nicer feeling. He drops his shoulder in relaxation.

“Ready for the other one?” Moana asks when he does this, and again, without waiting for his response, she dumps the water from the other half of the coconut over his other shoulder and the cuts on that side. She then crawls over to where she left the bandages before returning to her spot.

“Do you think you need a bandage on your back?”

“Eh, it’ll probably just fall off” He says, shrugging.

“Well, in that case, is there anything else you’d want me to look over?” Moana asks, crawling to sit next to him.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I didn’t know you had it in you, Curly, but I feel great. Much better than I did last night" He says, and stands with ease before stretching.

“You ready to get back out there and save the world?” He asks, turning to her, and she smiles.

“Yeah” she says, standing. “Let’s do this”


End file.
